art/environment

Putting the project in perspective /  by Stephanie Beattie

key question:

How do the physical collaborations we enact in the every day connect us to each other & to larger social systems?

Can drawing attention to small, universal collaborations between strangers(?) via artistic tools & environments create awareness of & investment in collective experience?

 

Personal, emotional & intimate intervention, via interpersonal means, with impacts on individual conceptualization of group membership & global change via seeding ideas into the minds of people who have some impact on the intellectual conversation around social design & policy?

 

Now -> Next -> Future

the existing conditions (in the US) of disconnectedness, hyper-individualist thought, apathy towards the systems to which we contribute, ennui, a sense of helplessness, facelessness of the larger system, a lack of emotional connection to the larger group (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities)

simultaneous atomization & connectivity

next: 

bring people into emotional attentional contact with the mechanisms of the social systems that keep us together

 

future: 

people can act more often personally with an understanding & regard for the larger scales of their social effect, 

an intimate emotional awareness of the connectivity that exists & act with regard to it in order to better

 

physical analogues of social interactions, a series of designed meetings. 

social magic /  by Stephanie Beattie

I'm looking at human magic. Social magic. The relationships between people, the power they have as embodied in but not defined by the people in them.

 

Coercion & cohesion & cooperation

 

group identity, group intention, group formation

 

i'm making videos & installations about being with other people in long term cooperative relationships, whatever kind of cooperation it is, productive or destructive.

 

Groups as "hyper-individuals"